Just me being me. Continuously.

Monthly Archives: August 2013

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Brenda Barnett, out of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, [State Senator Jeremy] Hutchinson became interested in arming school personnel, he said. He was invited to attend an “active shooter” training and – using a rubber bullet-loaded pistol – he mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a “bad guy.”

There’s a slight increase (worsening) in the performance measurements, but it’s hard to say if that’s a real difference. So while there are a bunch of new Tor clients running, it would seem they’re not doing much. Anybody know details?

I found myself needing to make a lot of python classes based on dictionaries I was getting back from remote API services. Seemed only logical to make a class that made arbitrary attributes based on the info passed in.

The last few bastions held by the DSLR form factor are being slowly overrun: like image quality, EVF quality has passed ‘good enough’ and is well into the realm of very good to excellent.

I’ve wrestled with whether to update my DSLR rig as the wife’s due date approaches. After all, the birth of one’s first born seems the requisite time for such. But I’ve come to realize that I haven’t used my DSLR in several years now. For 90% of my photography, my iPhone is ‘good enough’ and, for the rest, I have a compact that’s ‘well into the realm of the very good.’

If you teach IT or Computing, this is a phrase that you’ll have heard a million times, a billion times, epsilon zero times, aleph one times. Okay I exaggerate, but you’ll have heard it a lot. There are variants of the phrase, all espousing today’s children’s technical ability. My favourite is from parents: ‘Oh, Johnny will be a natural for A-Level Computing. He’s always on his computer at home.’ The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

‘Computing’ is a universe unto itself. No one, no matter how ‘geeky’, is good at everything computer related. There’s a difference between computer literacy (‘I can sit down at a computer and use it’) and software engineering (‘I can write new software using a programming language’) and even software design (‘I can determine how a new piece of software should behave’). When we’re creating software, it isn’t just a bunch of computer geeks in a room together who somehow make it happen. The team must be diverse; we’re all geeks, but with different skill sets. You might see us as ‘computer geeks,’ but in reality I’m an operations geek, while my co-works range from math and science geeks to art geeks and everything in between.

The reason why is rooted largely in their unpredictability. They are the two current TV series where predicting what will happen in any given episode is nigh impossible and they are each committed to breaking the boundaries of conventional storytelling. Each is hugely critically-acclaimed and a phenomenon in their own small ways — Adventure Time is a massive ratings success with pan-generational appeal, and Louie has become the first basic cable show to score an Outstanding Comedy Series nomination at the Emmys.

Two of the best shows on TV. I have a hard time watching more than an episode of Louie at a time, though.